A Room of One's Own: Quotes

by - January 22, 2019


A Room of One's Own is a book by Virginia Woolf, which is based on a series of lectures she gave at Cambridge University. The book mostly deals with was to be a female writer. Here I bring several quotes from the book that I found interesting. 

ONE
"[...] a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction [...]" 
"Fiction must stick to the facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction — so we are told."

TWO 
"If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?"
"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possesing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size."
"It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do."
 THREE
"[...] fiction is like a spider-web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."
 FOUR
"For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind a single voice."
 FIVE
"But almost without exception they [women] are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex."
"[...] in our belief that, however clever we may be on top, we are very serious, very profound and very humane underneath."
"[...] she wrote as a woman, but has a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself." 
 SIX
"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say."
"But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh." 
 

You May Also Like

0 comments